As you might expect this divergence has everything to do with sex, particularly Twilight’s portrayal of female sexuality. Says Swanson:

Beth Felker Jones explains in Touched by a Vampire, “the themes of Twilight are all about what it means to be female.” This question of what it means to be female is one evangelicals have been trying to help girls answer for years. Whether it’s the formidable Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood or the franchised Every Man series, the evangelical media has produced an entire industry of relationship advice books that are not primarily about managing one’s love life, but are, rather, instructional guides to help readers personify “authentic” masculinity and femininity. And with the publication of books about Twilight written by evangelical Christian authors for adolescent girls, the evangelical conversation about Twilight has actually merged with the genre of evangelical relationship texts for young women. The manner in which such books respond to the cultural impact of Twilight follows the evangelical trajectory of placing gender at the heart of Christian faith, normalizing and spiritualizing patriarchal interpretations of femininity.

Be sure to check out the whole article and the two forthcoming installments which will complete the series. One final parting shot from Swanson’s apropos critique:

It is ultimately fitting that Twilight should be so often called a “guilty pleasure,” for at the very core of its narrative, we find guilt being linked to pleasure; a teenage girl wooed into physical intimacy but denied that intimacy the very moment she acts on her feelings. The mixed message of Edward’s pattern of seductive arousal, followed by shaming rejection, puts Bella in the position of needing to break Edward’s rules in order to honestly express what she feels. Bella is called a “bad girl” not because she is kissed, but because she kisses back. Kurt Bruner worries that Twilight will teach young readers that “even good girls are eager to have sex before marriage,” but he has no words of critique for Edward’s erotic pursuit of Bella. The cost of evangelical praise for Twilight is a deepening of the split between sexuality and spirituality wherein young girls have no recourse but to remain frozen like an obedient Bella would or become “bad” by reciprocating as Bella actually does. Either choice allows shame to reign where dignity should abide.

I’ve thought a bit about this question and I think that, fundamentally, this concern is ill-founded. More precisely it is ill-founded in that the way in which the question is formed tends to reflect too hasty a view of the sort of discourse that actually happens on blogs. Clearly if one were to just look at a given thread of comments one could make the case that there is regularly a lot of speaking too soon, emoting, and irresponsible speech — much like there is in countless normal face-to-face conversations. So if we were to judge blogging simply by this I suppose we could say that it does not foster patience.

But this would be just as short-sighted as deciding that personal conversation is too heated, immediate, and emotional to be a viable mode of communication on the basis overhearing one argument. Blogging, like any other mode of conversation must not be evaluated merely on a micro scale, but rather from the standpoint of an extended series of discourses that unfold over time as various people have conversation after conversation with one another.

Certainly blogging does not “foster patience” in the sense that participating in once comment thread will inculcate patience into its participants — any more than one argument between friends will immediately teach them how to communicate better to one another. Rather it is precisely by bearing with the impatience over numerous discussions that patience is fostered and mutual understanding is cultivated. Again, this is strikingly similar to how patience is learned in most other modes of interpersonal discussion. Couples learn to be patient with each other, not through one or two arguments, but over a long shared history of  being impatient with each other.

To my mind the reaction to blogging that fears it to be incapable of patience reflects a misunderstanding of this fundamental point. Blogging is, in fact, a great way to learn about patience in that, if you wish to be in it in a sustained way, you must work, over the long haul through misunderstandings, disagreements, and flare-ups of inappropriateness. You learn patience by bearing with the impatience, remaining in dialogue and continuing to write, comment, and converse. Precisely as such blogging, far from being antithetical to patience is actually a superb venue for cultivating it.

UPDATE: Brad East’s latest post, Personal Reflections on Two Years of Blogging seems to me to make a similar, and supporting point to what I have tried to say in this post.

But as Bonhoeffer points out beautifully in Ethics, the body of Christ language in Scripture serves first and foremost to point us to Christ and his act for the salvation of all humanity in the cross and resurrection:

Above all we must turn our eyes to the image of Jesus Christ’s own body — the one who became human, was crucified, and is risen. In the body of Jesus Christ, God is united with humankind, all humanity is accepted by God, and the world is reconciled to God. In the body of Jesus Christ, God took on the sin of all the world and bore it. There is no part of the world, no matter how lost, no matter how godless, that has not been accepted by God in Jesus Christ and reconciled to God. Whoever perceives the body of Jesus Christ in faith can no longer speak of the world as if it were lost, as if it were separated from God; they can no longer separate themselves in clerical pride from the world. The world belongs to Christ, and only in Christ is the world what it is. It needs, therefore, nothing less than Christ himself. Everything would be spoiled if we were to reserve Christ for the church while granting the world only some law, Christian though it may be. Christ died for the world, and Christ is Christ only in the midst of the world. It is nothing but unbelief to give the world — for well intentioned pedagogical reasons to be sure, which nonetheless leave an aftertaste of clericalism — less than Christ. It means not taking seriously the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the bodily resurrection. It means denying the body of Christ. (pp. 66-67)

Bonhoeffer goes show how understanding the church as the body of Christ means not that “the church-community is first and foremost set apart from the world. On the contrary, in line with the New Testament statements about God becoming flesh in Christ, it expresses just this — that in the body of Christ all humanity is accepted, included, and borne, and the the church-community of believers is to make this know to the world by word and life” (p. 67).

Thus the church is understood as the body of Christ first and foremost in terms of soteriology and Christology. In Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection God has taken on the flesh of all humanity (or rather all people participate in Christ’s own distinct humanity) and the church is the proleptic sign and sacrament of this reality. Thus, the church as the body of Christ is neither a metaphor or something to be explained in mystical terms. Rather it is a Christological reality. The church is the body of Christ in that it is the sign and sacrament of the event of Christ in which all human flesh, indeed the whole world is united and transfigured in the love of the triune God.

A thorough exploration of the connection between this project in Liberation Theology will certainly be made clear in the course of the future developed work, but for now, it may be helpful for us to take note of this passage from the first pages of Leonardo Boff’s Church: Charism and Power, which, please note, none of the three of us had encountered prior to our writing of the theses:

Kingdom-World-Church [this is the actual subtitle!]

In order to go beyond mere phenomenological analysis, we must identify the theological poles that enter into our understanding of what it is to be Church. The Church cannot be understood in and of itself because it is affected by those realities that transcend it, namely the Kingdom and the world. World and Kingdom are the two pillars that support the entire edifice of the Church. The reality of the Kingdom is that which defines both the world and the Church. Kingdom–the category used by Jesus to express his own unique intention (ipsissima intentio)–is the utopia that is realized in the world, the final good of the whole of creation in God, completely liberated from all imperfection and penetrated by the Divine. The Kingdom carries salvation to its completion. The world is the arena for the historical realization of the Kingdom. Presently the world is decadent and stained by sin; because of this, the Kingdom of God is raised up against the powers of the anti-Kingdom, engaged in the onerous process of liberation so that the world might accept the Kingdom itself and thus achieve its joyous goal.

The Church is that part of the world that, in the strength of the Spirit, has accepted the Kingdom made explicit in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnated in oppression. It preserves the constant memory and consciousness of the Kingdom, celebrating its presence in the world, shaping the way it is proclaimed, and at the service of the world. The Church is not the Kingdom but rather its sign (explicit symbol) and its instrument (mediation) in the world.

These three elements–Kingdom, world, and Church–must be spelled out in their proper order. First is the Kingdom as the primary reality that gives rise to the others. Second is the world as the place where the Kingdom is concretized and the Church is realized. Finally, the Church is the anticipatory and sacramental realization of the Kingdom in the world, as well as the means whereby the Kingdom is anticipated most concretely in the world.

There is a danger of too close an approximation, or even identification, of the Church and the Kingdom that creates an abstract and idealistic image of the Church that is spiritualized and wholly indifferent to the traumas of history. On the other hand, an identification of the Church and the world leads to an ecclesial image that is secular and mundane, one in which the Church’s power is in conflict with the other powers of the world. And there is the danger of a Church centered in on itself, out of touch both with the Kingdom and the world, such that it becomes a self-sufficient, triumphal, and perfect society, many times duplicating the services normally found in civil society, failing to recognize the relative autonomy of the secular realm.

These dangers are theological ‘pathologies’ that cry out for treatment; ecclesiological health depends on the right relationship between Kingdom-world-Church, in such a way that the Church is always seen as a concrete and historical sign (of the Kingdom and of salvation) and as its instrument (mediation) in salvific service to the world.” (pp. 1-2).

Now, I should say that we would probably need to qualify what we mean when we speak of the church as the “mediation” of the kingdom in the world, but the affinity between Boff’s account here and the account we have gestured towards in the theses should be more than apparent in this quote. The point, if it needs to be said, is that for us, a sustained re-engagement with Liberation Theology is much, much more than merely a surface-level, or apparent concern. Indeed, one of the key concerns we about about the state of much of contemporary ecclesio-concentric theology is the way in which it relies on a sort of back-door rejection of the specific concerns and critiques of Liberation Theology in favor of exalting ecclesial and sacramental practices cast in theopolitical verbiage (e.g. Bell’s Liberation Theology After the End of History and Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist).

For now, folks would do well to check out a recent post by Tim McGee about John Milbank’s inherently imperialistic theology and its detrimental relation to Christian mission and Christian approaches to Isalm (I would also suggest browsing through the old posts at Rwanda and Theology — there’s a lot of good stuff there). McGee rightly points out that, for all Milbank’s talk of an ontology of peaceable difference, for him “the form of harmonic difference is simply a nondifferential difference, an irrelevant difference, for they will basically become like us (and thus the binary still reigns supreme).”

McGee concludes, rightly, that for Milbank:

For the sake of a better Islam, Islam must be subjugated to Euro-Catholic cultural forms.  Since there are some small strands of this culture within Islam, Euro-Catholic Christians can and ought to form them in this way.  Since they are small and minor traditions, such a transformation can only be secured by Euro-Catholic rule.  Finally, since the differences between Islam and Christianity are irreducible, such Euro-Catholic rule must be perpetual:  Muslims must be continually coerced into striving to become what will forever escape them, that is, a proper (Western, Christian) human community.  That is missions-qua-Milbank, which is utterly incompatible with missions-qua-scripture (Acts).

“Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” The story of cross and grave, as we have been attempting to hear and think it and to ask about its living out, tells of a contradiction between God and the world, a conflict in which evil triumphs over good, death extinguishes life, and the creatures annihilate their Maker. But the contradiction is not absolute, not is the conflict finally resolved in favor of negation. For there flourishes even more grace beyond the great magnitude of evil, a divine fertility beyond the barrenness of the demonic; and and out of the mutual opposition of the world and its Creator, there sounds a final and decisive Yes to the creatures, powerful, living and redemptive, which promises them freedom and fullness within the expansive embrace of God’s own history and life. To this triumphal Easter Yes, which never cancels bud does transcend God’s judgmental No to the world on the cross and the world’s destructive No to God in the grave, ecclesiology must clearly correspond.

So then, just as the mutual hostility between the world and God which reigns on Easter Saturday is not the final state of their relations, but yields to affirmation, renewal, and redemption for precisely those who secured the death of the living God, likewise the protest of the church, God’s chosen, living people, against the sinful, corrupt, and frequently demonic world, cannot be the final word of the Christian community to those around it. Prophetic judgment upon the world and holy separation from it must actively promote and witness to the experiential impact on the world of the greater abundance yet of God’s resurrecting grace beyond the increase of its own hostility, foolishness, and brokenness. Whatever opposition the holy church properly directs to the unrighteousness and injustice of its alien, surrounding culture, that resistance itself expresses obedience to the church’s calling to be truly catholic, immersed in solidarity and presence in the seemingly godless and godforsaken world. And equally that catholic presence is not a supine, quiescent, inert companionship which does nothing creatively for the world in which Christians are quietly embedded. The church’s critical posture toward the world is not ultimately negative, nor is its hidden presence in the world quite passive. Rather, we must reaffirm that the Easter Saturday church, Christ’s buried body, is in essence and identity for the world, and that that identity is realized not just attitudinally or spiritually, but by way of active engagements with and infiltrations of the world. Such actions are not designed to supplant or masquerade as God’s own redemptive work; but certainly, through the Spirit of Christ, they are to provide a humble yet energetic and credible instrumentality for that divine transforming of the world which shall constitute the final kingdom. In that renewal of heaven and earth, the dynamic, eschatological favor of God’s grace toward the world which rejected, crucified, and buried God’s own Son, the church as Christ’s buried but resurrected body cannot but be involved, as servant and participant. (p. 384-85)

Emotional, self-centered love cannot tolerate the dissolution of a community that has become false, even for the sake of genuine community. And such self-centered love cannot love an enemy, that is to say, one who seriously and stubbornly resists it. Both spring from the same source: emotional love is by its very nature desire, desire for self-centered community. As long as it can possibly satisfy this desire, it will not give it up, even for the sake of truth, even for the sake of genuine love for others. But emotional, self-centered love is at an end when it can no longer expect its desire to be fulfilled, namely, in the face of an enemy. There it turns into hatred, contempt, and slander. . . Self-centered love makes itself an end in itself. It turns itself into an achievement, an idol it worships to which it must subject everything. It cares for, cultivates, and loves itself and nothing else in the world. Spiritual love, however, comes from Jesus Christ; it serves him alone. It knows that it has no direct access to other persons. Christ stand between me and all others. I do not know in advance what love of others means on the basis of a general idea of love that grows out of my emotional desires. All this may instead be hatred and the worst kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ. Only Christ in his Word tells me what love is. Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love for my brothers and sisters really looks like. Therefore spiritual love is bound to Christ alone. Where Christ tells me to maintain community for the sake of love, I desire to maintain it. Where the truth of Christ orders me to dissolve a community for the sake of love,. I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my self-centered love. Because spiritual love does not desire but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother of sister. It originates neither in the brother of sister nor in the enemy, but in Christ and his word. Self-centered, emotional love can never comprehend spiritual love, for spiritual love is from above. It is something completely strange, new, and incomprehensible to all earthly love.

~ Dietrch Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 43.

It goes something like this: Anabaptism is important and helpful because, out of all the streams of the Christian tradition, it is the one that can teach us about how important it is to be pacifists. Thus, we the way that the Anabaptist witness is appropriated is generally by Catholic or mainline Protestant Christians embracing pacifism while remaining unchanged in regard to other theological distinctives. A good example of this is the Mennonite-Catholic dialogue group, Bridgefolk, which describes itself as “a movement of sacramentally-minded Mennonites and peace-minded Roman Catholics who come together to celebrate each other’s traditions, explore each other’s practices, and honor each other’s contribution to the mission of Christ’s Church.”

Note the way this is set up: Mennonites have got peace and Catholics have got sacramentalism. Let’s slap the two together for extra ecumenical awesomeness! The Bridgefolk self-description goes on: “Together we seek better ways to embody a commitment to both traditions. We seek to make Anabaptist-Mennonite practices of discipleship, peaceableness, and lay participation more accessible to Roman Catholics, and to bring the spiritual, liturgical, and sacramental practices of the Catholic tradition to Anabaptists.” Again the mode of ecumenism at work here is clear: Mennonites have some good stuff to say about “discipleship” and “peaceableness” while Catholicism has got it figured out when it comes to “spiritual, liturgical, and sacramental practices.” All we need to do is appropriate these lovely elements and, viola! we have the perfect new instantiation of the Christian faith!

Now, to be sure I appreciate the way in which the contributions of the Anabaptist tradition to nonviolence and peacemaking are being appreciated by other elements of Christianity. I am truly thankful for this and I’m sure a lot of good comes out of groups like Bridgefolk. However, I think this sort of “reception” of Anabaptism is often a way of not actually taking Anabaptism seriously. The Anabaptist tradition is not, first of all, about “nonviolence” but rather about the nature of discipleship, the church, the world and the meaning of Christ’s Lordship. You can’t divorce Anabaptist’s theology of peace from their commitment to things like believer’s baptism, voluntary church membership, congregationalism, the rejection of clericalism, and yes, opposition to certain understandings of sacramentalism. To do so is to fail to take the tradition with any real seriousness. The same is true for Anabaptists and Mennonites who quickly latch on to quasi-Catholic enthusiasm about sacramental theology. (Indeed, most of what I’m saying here applies, vice-versa, to free churchers who think they can appropriate whatever elements of Catholicism they find compelling, a similarly-common tendency.)

The only point I really want to make here is that the assumption of some sort of easy give-and-take between the free churches and the establishment churches (Catholic or Protestant) is profoundly misguided. The Anabaptist tradition isn’t just “there” to provide mainline churches with a handy theological pacifism any more than the magisterial traditions are there to give free churches a nice way to think sacramentally. The divisions are much deeper, much more real, and indeed must more theological than such sorts of ecclectic ecumenism of convenience tends to acknowledge.

When Jesus said to His disciples, “In the world, kings lord it over their subjects . . . Not so with you”; He was not beckoning His followers to a legalistic withdrawal from society out of concern for moral purity. Rather, His call was to an active missionary presence within society, a source of healing and creativity because it would take the pattern of His own suffering servanthood. . . . The call to those who know Him as Lord ad who confess Him as such is not to follow the fallen world in the kind of self-concern which He must overrule, but to follow Him in the self-giving way of love by which all the nations will one day be judged. (The Original Revolution, 174, 75)

What is striking about Yoder’s reception of this scriptural imperative is the way in which he recognizes that the calling to the community of disciples to manifest a distinctive way of life is not out of concern for cultic purity or their own secure establishment in blessedness, but rather out of concern for mission to the world in the mode of self-giving service. Surely Yoder is right that the calling of discipleship could never be a call to any sort of “self-concern,” whether individualistically or corporately conceived. Rather “the self-giving way of love” must always be be directed towards the world in a mode of “active missionary presence.”

After all, who could be the object of “the self-giving way of love” other than the world if we confess that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19)? Not surprisingly this is another section of the New Testament to which Yoder consistently returned.

One other crucial focus today is, of course, the act of reconciliation with Christians of the Mennonite/Anabaptist tradition.  It is in relation to this tradition that all the ‘historic’ confessional churches have perhaps most to repent, given the commitment of the Mennonite communities to non-violence.  For these churches to receive the penitence of our communities is a particularly grace-filled acknowledgement that they still believe in the Body of Christ that they have need of us; and we have good reason to see how much need we have of them, as we look at a world in which centuries of Christian collusion with violence has left so much unchallenged in the practices of power.  Neither family of believers will be simply capitulating to the other; no-one is saying we should forget our history or abandon our confession.  But in the global Christian community in which we are called to feed one another, to make one another human by the exchange of Christ’s good news, we can still be grateful for each other’s difference and pray to be fed by it.

This strikes me as one of the few (I can’t think of any others, actually) occasions where I’ve heard someone of such high ecclesiastical office from one of the magisterial traditions take the Free Churches and their vital contributions to Christianity with some amount of non-patronizing seriousness. And for that, I am quite appreciative.

The Lord’s Supper is bread for the world – not simply in virtue of the sacramental bread that is literally shared and consumed, but because it is the sign of a humanity set free for mutual gift and service.  The Church’s mission in God’s world is inseparably bound up with the reality of the common life around Christ’s table, the life of what a great Anglican scholar called homo eucharisticus, the new ‘species’ of humanity that is created and sustained by the Eucharistic gathering and its food and drink.  Here is proclaimed the possibility of reconciled life and the imperative of living so as to nourish the humanity of others.  There is no transforming Eucharistic life if it is not fleshed out in justice and generosity, no proper veneration for the sacramental Body and Blood that is not correspondingly fleshed out in veneration for the neighbour.

If, then, we are called to feed the world – recalling Jesus’ brisk instruction to his disciples to give the multitudes something to eat (Mark 6.37) – the challenge is to become a community that nourishes humanity, a humanity on the one hand open and undefended, on the other creatively engaged with making the neighbour more human.  ‘Give us our daily bread’ must also be a prayer that we may be transformed into homo eucharisticus, that we may become a nourishing Body.  Our internal church debates might look a little different if in each case we asked how this or that issue relates to two fundamental things – our recognition that we need one another for our own nourishment and our readiness to offer all we have and are for the feeding, material and spiritual, of a hungry world.

As things are, we are liable to fall into a variety of traps.  We may conduct our interchurch quarrels in a spirit that sends out a clear message of unwillingness to live with the other and be fed by them.  We may consume our time and energy in what we like to think of as service to the needy, while ignoring our own need and poverty, especially our need of silence and receptivity to God.  We may imagine that by faithfully performing the liturgy we embody the reality of the Kingdom, whether or not we are being transformed into a community of mutual nourishment.  We may focus so closely on the rights of human persons that we lose sight of their beauty and dignity, the beauty and dignity that help to feed us. The list could go on.  But the point is that the intimate connection between our mission and the prayer for our daily bread impacts at so many levels on the life of discipleship that the range of possible areas of failure is correspondingly broad.

The worst reaction to this would be simple anxiety.  The best is to recognise that our vulnerability to failure is itself a reminder of our basic hunger, our need for each other.  The bread of truth is also the bread of honesty about ourselves, and a church that is genuinely growing up into Christ will be one that is prepared to hear its judgement on these and other matters with patience and gratitude.  So when we pray for our daily bread, we pray too for awareness of our failure, and – hard as this always is – for the grace to hear the truth about it from one another, and also from the wider world.  For God can also act to nourish our humanity by the challenges and questions and rebukes that the rest of the human race puts to the Church.

In the meantime, here is a segment from the conclusion to the presentation I gave with Jana Bennett at EP on “blogging as theological discourse”:

So, in conclusion if I were to venture some guesses about how we might best go about this open-ended and uncertain work of “seeing how this will work”, I would offer four guidelines, which I offer no less to myself than to others:

1. Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse must be open to critique, re-formation, and revision in light of the voices of others. Blogging, by its very nature is open and participatory towards a variety of discursive voices. Moreover, blogging tends to generate a variety of discussions outside of the medium of blogs themselves.
2. Blogging generates a multi-level discussion. It is precisely in attending to these discussions with care for the voice of the other and allowing them to shape future discussions and explorations of the themes discussed that we blog faithfully. In short, blogging must be shaped by the conversation it generates if it is to be truly fruitful.
3. Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse must embrace its open-ended and fundamentally itinerant nature. Blogging, if it attempts to accomplish the work of books and journal articles, will simply be a poor exercise. Blogging’s piecemeal, fragmentary, and dynamic nature must be embraced, and precisely so, be discovered as a mode of open and unpredictable discourse. It is a dialogical space for pilgrims, wayfarers, and strangers who are enabled in this space to discover unexpected conversations about the call of God on our lives. In this sort of itinerant space we have the opportunity to allow ourselves to be known, in all our facileness, haste, and vulnerability, and to simply be conversationally present without pretension to over-importance, establishment, or self-validation. This, at least, is what I believe theological blogging must aspire to be.
4. Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse ought always to be shaped and birthed from a life of lived prayer in the context of the church in its mission to the world. Blogging, at its best should arise from reflection on the concrete life of the church for and in the world, and, precisely as such, it must be grounded in prayer, that is, in the cry for the kingdom which gives the church its shape, life, and calling. To seek any form of faithful theological discussion outside of a common life of prayer for the coming of the Triune God to transfigure, renew, and interrupt us, is to engage in false and futile pursuits. This is not a pious gloss. Prayer is essential for good conversation about God. This applies to blogging no less than to any other mode of theological conversation. Perhaps more so.Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse must, by the Spirit, learn proper patience in the midst of the immediacy of response that blogging tends to generate. Haste is perhaps the greatest temptation of blogging. Only by being given over to patience, the fruit of the Spirit which takes shape in our life together under Christ’s lordship, can we pursue this sort of discussion in a truly fruitful manner.

The discussion in the workshop was, I think, quite good, especially in that it allowed a number of folks who have been involved in the online discussions on this blog to engage in face-to-face conversation about the whole dynamic of theological discussion in the medium of blogs.